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Anarchive n°8 - Muntadas Media Architecture Projects

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Anarchive n°1 - Muntadas Media Architecture Installations

Muntadas Media Architecture Installations project is an Interom that Muntadas defines as a format combining a CD-ROM and an exit on Internet
It is part of a series of works that investigates contemporary social spaces through architecture and media archetypes.
An imaginary space.
An hybrid space composed by different sorts of functions and "values" based on concepts, displacements, projects and process, all related to a series of Muntadas's works "Media Architecture Installations"
This project tries to make connections between the works traveling through their physical space and their discourse.


publisher : Centre Pompidou, September 1999

coproduction : Université de Paris 1 (CRECA) / Centre Georges Pompidou
with the cooperation of  Ministère de la Culture, Délégation aux Arts Plastiques (FIACRE)
with the participation of Fundación Arte y Technologia (Madrid),  Fundación la « Caixa » (Barcelona),  Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Le Métafort d'Aubervilliers,  Fonds franco-américain pour l'art contemporain « Etant donnés » and ZKM Institute or Visual Media (Karlsruhe).

executive producer : lab production
associated producer : Z-A production


Muntadas Media Architecture Installations
CD-Rom Mac/PC, ISBN 2-85850-993-X
United States : http://www.eai.org

Right from his earliest experiments, Muntadas focused his artistic activity on a critigue of the media, namely systems of representarion and information including not only television, the press and advertising, but also architecture in the twin senses of public buildings and invisible telecommunications networks.

The core of Muntadas's oeuvre since l97l has consisted of some thirty videotapes plus nearly sixty installations and actions in public places (taking the form of a display sign, a carpet, a limousine and so on), not to mention publications. screenprints and works in various other media. A given idea may be concretized simultaneously as a book, a mailing, a videotape, a compact disc or an installation. A work may also exist in the form of a project.

By "reading between the lines" to grasp the objective and subjective meanings of language and images, Muntadas deals with the « invisible mechanisrns" that shape the production and reception of media discourse. He analyses the processes through which information is mediatized and manipulated. His critical strategies include appropriating, fragmenting, decomposing, singling out and recontexualizing images and texts, thereby opening a space or void between signs, lines, borders and sounds in order to grasp new relationships. By slowing things down, something new may be seen/heard; by making unexpected associations, the profound connections between the realms of culture, politics, economics, religion and sports may be revealed. Raising. questions is Muntadas's primary position.

The theory behind these works springs from a series of dualities: art/life, transmission/reception, visible/invisible, private/pubilc, subjective/ objective, video/television, etc. Muntadas interrogates the shifting relations of attraction, reciprocity and opposition between these dualities, developing metaphors, reinterpreting archirectural archetypes, restaging media presentations and theatricalizing social and political rituals in order to produce an oeuvre profoundly engaged in current social reality.

This CD-ROM employs an interface based on an imaginary space that superimposes four distinct levels : observatory, auditorium, Iibrary, and airport.

The observatory (blue level) offers access to Muntadas's Internet project Hybridspaces. lmages related to ten types of "attribute" (communication, leisure activities, consumption, technology, transportation, media, worship, language, economy, geography) may be combined by the user, who then explores and effects conditions of hybridization. Links are offered to other sites that address similar issues.

The auditorium (red level) makes it possible to consult the artist's preliminary drawings, diagrams and notes, testifying to the work of conceiving and developing each piece. Consistent form and principles thus emerge, along with the key idea behind each work, as well as propositions that may recur in later works. A drawing by Muntadas is the basis of every digitized 3D model, thereby becoming the icon of the work and the key to its description.

The library (yellow level) is a place of study, where the user can select one of seven keywords evoking the major concepts and working principles that underlie Muntadas's entire oeuvre : archetype, context, archives, media, project, in/visible, montage. Each of these terms is linked to a list of words, and each of those words to a series of works. Depending on the word and work selected, commentaries evoke the relationship between the work and keyword. Works from different periods and different genres are interrelated here, each presented in a brief descriptive file.

The airport (green level) provides a path to works through the various cities where they were produced. This "geography of an exhibition" makes it possible to visualize the context of the work's presentation as well as to evoke the idea of transition or shift, like shifting from one language or work to another.

Each of the four levels provides access to an underlying level (gray), which provides a detailed description of the twelve installations and actions.

The detailed description can be approached in four possible ways :
- elements. The various elements constituting the work, essential to its definition and installation, are described precisely. A digitized model is used as the basis of this exploration.
- installation. Photographs and video material show various presentations of the work and variations inherent in the installation.
- references. A choice of critical articles, accounts, essays and artist's statements provide a better understanding of the work in question.
- related works. Muntadas has often expressed an interest in what occurs between works, in the transition from one to another. Each of the selected works is therefore linked to brief descriptions of other pieces that explore the same medium (publication, sound montage, poster, videotape) or same idea, or else display formal or conceptual affinities with it.

The menu not only offers standard navigational functions, it also makes it possible to access several data bases : a biography, a bibliography (general bibliography, choice of texts, interviews and texts by Muntadas, list of catalogues), lists of works (videotapes and films, installations, actions in the public sphere, publications, list of museums and galleries with works by Muntadas in their collections) and lists of solo and group exhibitions.

This CD-ROM is produced in three languages: English, French and Spanish (occasionally Catalan). The user may change language at any moment.